by Ruth Rendell
Witnessing some of this, Becky thought at first it was innocent, Will having no idea of James’s preference but acting with a child’s characteristic egocentricity. But staying in the room with them for a longer period than usual, she saw that this wasn’t so. Will was doing it on purpose to annoy, handing James the remote, then taking it back and returning to his favoured channel. From time to time he cast sly glances at James, watching his exasperation with satisfaction, and Becky understood something up till this moment hidden from her. It was taken for granted that those with, to put it politically correctly, ‘special needs’, must be perfectly good and pure, their virtue co-existent with their disability. They were like those holy fools in nineteenth century Russian novels, their saintliness compensating for what they lacked in intellect. It wasn’t so, it was false. Will had the same jealousies and resentments, the same desire for vindictive revenge, as anyone else, but in him it was more overt and more marked because he was a child in a man’s body and, like a child, he showed his triumph in his face. When, finally losing the last vestiges of patience, James threw down the Radio Times and stalked out of the room, Will laughed out loud, rocking backwards and forwards on the sofa.
Jeremy fetched his car from the garage in the mews on Sunday evening and parked it, as he was permitted to do at weekends and holidays, on the single yellow line in St Michael’s Street. Of all the street’s residents, it was probably only Anwar Ghosh who was awake and up at seven thirty in the morning, drinking his mug of cocoa—he never lay in—and he was the sole observer of Jeremy’s unlocking the car, placing a large flower arrangement, a bottle of champagne, a parcel that might have held a book or a box of chocolates, and a Selfridges yellow bag on the back seat, and driving off.
Making an early start, Jeremy was on his way to see his mother. Though always devoted to her, he had given more thought to her than usual since his experience of Saturday and now she filled his mind. It was almost impossible for him to imagine himself in her place, for he had never tried to understand women and now it was too late to begin. Had she ever known about his father and Tess—her surname he still couldn’t recall—or had she been in ignorance of the affair? If she had known, how much would she have minded? Perhaps she had known but preferred to keep silent, fearing that if things came out into the open her husband would leave her. Jeremy could never ask her, never even touch on the subject. The best he could hope for was that she had never known or that time had dulled the memory as age took away passion and jealousy and the pain of rejection. Did it? He had read that it did but he didn’t really know.
Driving up the nearly empty motorway, deserted by the Jubilee celebrants in favour of central London, he let his mind return to Tess and her bedroom and his escape from it, and the all-pervading scent. He could view it now without humiliation, without shame and self-castigation. He had been a child and she had used him unforgivably. It was the result of that immediately buried experience which concerned him now. No doubt a desire to kill Tess, a rage which must have followed his failure and her unconcealed amusement, had been buried with it, surfacing and resurfacing not when he saw a woman like her or of comparable age or with legs like hers, but when he smelt a wave, drifting behind a woman, of that unmistakable perfume. And now he recalled what the girl who sprayed him with it had said, how it was old but the brand revived ‘by popular demand’, that it had been called ‘Yes’ but recently renamed.
Those girls he killed all used it. Perhaps Gaynor Ray was still wearing the old version, bought from some small back-street shop, but the others, his later victims, had been persuaded by current fashion to use the renamed brand. This was the answer too to the enigma of why he had never been incited to murder in the long years between his teens and his mid-forties. The perfume wasn’t there to be worn, had been withdrawn, almost as if—how fanciful, how ridiculous!—the manufacturers sensed its lethal potential.
When he smelt it, drifting behind these women, discernible only to someone with a superlative sense of smell, he must have been at once transported back to revengeful rage, unquenchable except by killing Tess in each of them. It struck him as quite funny, in a macabre way, that he didn’t know what the perfume was called. He thought he knew everything, now, but not the name of the agent which directed him to murder.
When Will asked if he could stay the night, James announced he would go home. His friends were leaving in the evening; by the time he got there they would be gone. At the signs of his departure, Will didn’t go so far as to cheer or say, ‘Good,’ but his satisfied smile did it for him. Becky had planned to take them out to dinner and was trying to think of a place which would have the kind of food her nephew liked, yet be acceptable to her lover, but now she could abandon all that, and she and Will go alone to a Café Rouge or even a McDonald’s. If James had packed his things and walked out a fortnight ago, if he had said nothing to Will as he left and given her no more than a kiss on the cheek and a cold, ‘Well, goodbye then,’ she would have been very nearly distraught. On this evening she felt relief and if she had recourse, once James was gone, to the gin bottle, this was mere habit. Any evening would seem lacking, deprived, without a few swigs of strong spirits to prepare her for whatever might be in store.
If Becky wasn’t going to cook for him—for the second time that day, it would have been—Will wanted to go to a fish and chips restaurant where she had taken him once before. He was in jubilant mood, positively crowing, and naturally making no effort to hide this, over James’s leaving and Becky’s agreement with his suggestion that he should stay till Tuesday.
‘I don’t like him,’ he said as he got into her car. ‘He’s not nice. Don’t have him here again, will you?’
‘I’m not promising that, Will.’
‘He sulks. Monty told me sulking is bad. Better get cross and shout than sulk, he says.’ Will always talked about the children’s home and its staff as if he were still there and their advice still being delivered to him. ‘Why is what he wants to see on telly better than what I want?’
It was unanswerable. What would she have told a ten-year-old if he had asked that same question? Because he’s grown-up and you’re a child was barely permissible to a real child; to Will it would be outrageous. James should have given way, she thought, he should be the wise, understanding one. After all, it was only once a week—well, twice this week. Thinking like that made her shiver, she didn’t quite know why. The consequences of it all were that she felt something like dislike for both of them, but for Will it was tempered with tolerance, with making allowances, while for James—her feelings for him were shrivelling, each time they were together declining a little more. Soon, she thought, as she and Will were shown to a table, anything she had once had with him would be gone.
Excited by the smell of frying, Will was doing his best to decipher the fortunately limited menu, hesitating between plaice and rockfish. She ordered him a Coke. If the restaurant hadn’t been reasonably sophisticated she wouldn’t have come, despite Will’s pleadings, and for herself she asked for a large glass of white wine.
‘Oh, what lovely things! You’re so good to me, darling.’
Thus Jeremy’s mother when she arranged the flowers in no fewer than three vases, unwrapped the chocolates and removed the flask of Tourmaline from its yellow bag. Jeremy basked in her approval, felt happier than he had since the first blackmailing phone call. His mother produced one of his favourite lunches, the kind of Ascot–Glyndebourne picnic hamper she seldom offered and he seldom had: smoked salmon, game pie and salad, and strawberries and cream. She insisted they had the champagne.
After lunch she again departed from the norm by talking about his father. As she produced a photograph album he couldn’t remember seeing before, it occurred to him that it must have been some years since she had so much as mentioned Douglas Gibbons’s name. Was that odd in an elderly widow? Or was it that in any long life, a companion who had shared no more than fifteen years of it must fade with the passing of time and lose the great
importance he once had?
Jeremy was confronted by pictures of himself at eleven, at twelve, and then the fateful age, thirteen. To his middle-aged eyes, his young self looked like what he was, an exceptionally tall schoolboy with a schoolboy’s untried, inexperienced face and innocent eyes. His refusal to smile hid the hated brace. What had Tess seen in him to make her desire him sexually? His father’s face? He was thinking along those lines, with a fair degree of tranquillity, when suddenly she was before him. There she was in the next photograph with his parents and a man who might have been the husband she had parted from, and two other people Jeremy thought he recognised as next-door neighbours. His calm was destroyed and he struggled not to show it but was unable to resist closing his eyes against that too-clear image of her.
At the same time, though he believed it to be purely coincidental, his mother took the album on to her own lap and closed it. ‘You young people’, she said, ‘find old snapshots a bit of a bore, don’t you?’
Immediately he demurred. ‘Not a bit, not a bit. It’s a very long time since I’ve seen a photo of Dad.’
His instinct was to say ‘my father’ but he managed ‘Dad’ because he thought it would please her. If it did she gave no sign of it but sighed, rather in the way he had heard Inez Ferry sigh, not from suffering or pain or despair, but from loneliness, he thought. Yet she was smiling at him, saying, ‘Your father was a good husband’—and then spoiled it with—‘on the whole.’
He was astonished, suddenly afraid to hear more. What would he do if it all came out, Tess and possibly—horror of horrors—other women before Tess? But he soon knew there was no danger. If the photographs had reminded her of anything in particular, it seemed unlikely to have been her husband’s infidelity.
Then she dropped another few seeds of doubt into his mind. ‘You know, dear, I was brought up not to expect too much from a man. I was taught that in some ways they never grow up—not you, of course, you’re quite different. My mother used to say that if a woman wanted something she might have to persuade and plan and—well, scheme, to get it, but if a man wanted something he would simply take it as of right. And, generally, I think, I found that.’
He was afraid to ask what she meant. But it left him with a picture in his mind of his father grabbing anything he thought he had a right to, including women.
The subject of his father she abandoned after that piece of philosophising and returned to praising his flowers, his chocolates. It was a fine sunny day, quite different from what had been forecast, and they went out for a walk along the country lanes and took a footpath across meadows to the church, coming back by way of a wood and another lane. This walk he had been on a thousand times, as a child with his mother, later on alone or with friends, but he looked at it with new eyes, wondering if his father had ever met Tess in this wood. In retrospect, she seemed the kind of woman who would relish sex in the open air, especially when an element of risk was attached to it. But Tess’s house had been at least ten miles away and this place was so near his mother’s home as to have been positively dangerous …
They had soup and cold chicken for supper, and Jeremy took his departure just before eight. The road, he had thought, would be empty, no one returning to London until the following afternoon, but he was wrong and soon found himself in a traffic jam. He had meant to take the car back to Chetwynd Mews and go to Paddington by tube or taxi, but it was past eleven by the time he entered the outskirts of London. He drove straight to the Edgware Road and put the car back on a yellow line, this time in Praed Street.
Inez’s lights were still on. As he climbed the stairs he was visited by an unfamiliar longing for company. All the way home he had felt uncertain, insecure, in danger. A new week had begun and in that week, maybe on Wednesday, maybe later, he had decided that those people, that girl, would come back to him asking for more. He had more, a reasonable amount more, but what was to stop them persisting and cleaning him out? Without much preliminary thought as to why his normal feeling of self-sufficiency had deserted him, he tapped on Inez’s door. She didn’t hear or was determined not to and he knocked again. Instead of speaking to him on the entryphone, she paused inside the door to view whoever it was through the spyhole. Then she opened it, though looking far from welcoming.
‘I’ve just come back from my mother’s,’ he said. ‘There’s a crowd of kids in the street’—there wasn’t—‘and when I saw your lights on so late I wondered if they’d been bothering you.’
‘No. Everything’s been quite calm and peaceful.’
‘May I come in?’
Although her expression told him that she would prefer him not to, her voice said, though coldly, ‘Yes, of course.’
She had switched off the television but failed to hide the cassette sleeve with its picture of her late husband. It’s almost a vice with her, he thought savagely, it’s her kind of pornography. All his wistfulness, his desire for company, any company, was devoured by rage at her reception of him. Instead of sitting down, he stood in the middle of the room making anodyne replies when she asked him how his mother was, what the state of the traffic had been. She didn’t offer him a drink but said, ‘Well, if there’s nothing I can do for you, I was on the point of going to bed.’
Liar, he thought, I bet you were playing with yourself over images of a dead man. Necrophile. Suddenly he loathed the whole household, that fool and the mad Russian woman, the moron next door to them and his girlfriend, as thick as he, and Inez most of all. He would have liked to murder her, garrotte her there in her own living room as somewhere a distant clock struck midnight. It was impossible. He knew he couldn’t do it. She was inviolable, as any woman would be unless she walked ahead of him, trailing a cloud of the nameless scent. And perhaps even they had escaped him now he had solved the mystery and analysed the cause of his killer instinct. He had killed them because he couldn’t help it, because a scent and a memory drove him on, but he wasn’t sorry. He was glad because he hated them, all of them.
‘Goodnight,’ he said to Inez, and his voice to him sounded hoarse and throaty. ‘I just thought I’d check you were all right.’
‘Yes, thank you. I’m fine. Goodnight.’
The door closed rather too quickly for politeness behind him. When all this was over, and all his accumulated savings perhaps paid to that girl in the black thing, perhaps then, if he was still safe, he would give it all up, this double life, and go home and live with his mother for the remainder of her life. Why not? He loved her and she loved him. She was the only person he had been able to be with for long without boredom and disgust.
By now he should have been tired but if he went to bed he was sure he wouldn’t sleep. He made himself the drink Inez had failed to produce and sat down to savour it, though, as by no means the first of the day, it lacked the lovely effect of a gin and tonic, say, drunk at noon. The newspaper, in its virgin state, lay on the coffee table. He opened it to be confronted by Jubilee pictures, the Royal Family in pastels or military uniforms, the sun shining on the bright foliage in the parks. Apart from the howl of a fire siren rising, falling, dying away, all was silent. Seldom was it quite as quiet as this. Ten to one in the morning and another Bank Holiday tomorrow—no, today. He would have a leisurely bath and that might make him sleepy.
Taking his drink with him, he was halfway to the bathroom when the phone rang. He almost dropped the glass. It could only be one person, no one else would call him at this hour. For nine rings he let it go on. Then he lifted the receiver and heard her voice, that horrible accent, that careless speech.
‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you. You may have to give us more, I said. You will. Flats cost a lot and they’re going up all the time. Five thousand and that’ll be the end, I reckon. Can’t be positive but it looks that way.’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Let me speak to your boyfriend.’
‘Why?’
‘To prove he exists. Is he there?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s not. I’ll get ba
ck to you tomorrow.’
Unable to sleep, Inez sat up in bed worrying about things that would scarcely have caused her anxiety in the daytime. So far she had done nothing about a replacement for Zeinab when she left her job on Thursday evening, now in less than three days’ time. She asked herself if this omission was due to her no longer really believing a word Zeinab said. No doubt, Morton Phibling intended to marry her on Saturday, but did she mean to marry him? The wedding dress, Inez thought, the engagement ring … But she had another engagement ring, allegedly given her by Rowley Woodhouse. If Rowley Woodhouse existed …
Thinking along these lines reminded her that Phibling hadn’t, in fact, been into the shop since at least last Tuesday, perhaps longer. Had something gone wrong? Had Zeinab perhaps confessed to him that, due to her carelessness, the pendant had been stolen in the robbery? That would be enough to make a man angry but surely not sufficient to make him cancel his wedding. So should she begin looking for an assistant to take her place? If she didn’t, Freddy would certainly offer, and not only offer but refuse to accept a ‘no, thank you’. She didn’t think she could stand another dose of Freddy five days a week for ten hours a day. From time to time her thoughts reverted to the problem of the key with which those people had got into her house. Freddy was absolutely honest, she was sure of that, but still he might have been taken in by some villain of a friend, though she could hardly see how.
